Dan Kennedy's blog on media and politics • published by the Boston Phoenix from 2002 to 2005

Friday, April 09, 2004

SCALIA'S LATEST QUACK-UP.
Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia is a disgrace. You already knew
that. But his latest, which resulted in a federal marshal
confiscating a tape from one reporter and deleting the memory from
another's digital recorder, ought to make all of us shudder at his
arrogance.

On Wednesday, Scalia spoke to a
group of high-school students in Mississippi. Apparently Scalia has a
longstanding policy against having his words recorded, and that policy never trickled down to two reporters.

As Scalia was addressing
an afternoon assembly at the Presbyterian Christian High School in
Hattiesburg, Deputy U.S. Marshal Melanie Rube confronted the
journalists and told them they must erase their recordings because
they violated the justice's policy against audio- or videotaping
of his public appearances.

After Associated Press reporter
Denise Grones balked, the marshal took her digital recorder and
erased its contents - after Grones explained how the machine
worked. The marshal also asked Hattiesburg American reporter
Antoinette Konz to hand over a cassette tape and returned it,
erased, after the event.

What's particularly despicable is
that the US Marshals Service is apparently trying to hang Rube out to
dry. Lane quotes David Turner, a spokesman for the service, as saying,
"Justice Scalia did not instruct the deputy to take that action."
Farther down, though, Lane writes: "She had been instructed to
enforce Scalia's policy during preparations for his visit, Turner
added." (I'm assuming that Lane means David Turner; in between he
introduces an Ed Turner, who is a spokesman for the Supreme
Court.)

In other words, Scalia didn't want
his words recorded, Rube well understood that she was supposed to
make sure his wishes were followed, but Rube's superiors won't give
her a pass for doing what she had clearly been instructed to
do.

Scalia should personally and
publicly apologize to Denise Grones and Antoinette Konz for his
idiotic demands, which are in direct contravention of what we should
expect in a free society. And he should apologize to Melanie Rube for
putting her in an impossible situation.

WHY PEOPLE HATE THE MEDIA, PART
CCXIV. Knight Ridder reports
that CBS is trying to put together a show that would attempt to find
abducted children. The show would take "viewers along on an emotional
and life-changing ride, from the abduction to the search in all its
intensity to the reunion of child and parents."

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About Media Log Archives

The Boston Phoenix's Media Log was launched in 2002 by the paper's then-media columnist, Dan Kennedy, who continued it until he left the paper in 2005. The Phoenix's current media columnist, Adam Reilly, is now the author of Media Log, which has since been renamed Don't Quote Me. Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, blogs at Media Nation.